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Welcome - Bill Ellzey |
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Welcome everyone and thank you for coming to Shumei’s 8th anniversary celebration. As you’ve noticed if you came between 10 o’clock and now, we changed the Saturday format from past years. For one thing, we started the day’s events before taking the opportunity to say “Welcome!”
Part of the change is that we’re calling the Saturday before the Anniversary-Sunday the “Community Day” instead of the “Interfaith Day.” Rather than providing about 5 minutes for brief comments, or poems or songs from upwards of 20 Crestone spiritual centers, as we’ve done in the past, we asked them if they would like to give longer presentations, have fewer of them and take turns from year to year. A group, The Interfaith Focus Group, formed to decide the who’s, what’s and when’s and the result is what you can read in your weekend booklet. Many thanks to the group for trailblazing this format. Also new this year are a couple of tents set up in front of the main office building where some of Crestone’s spiritual centers, arts organizations and agricultural interests offer information and their wares. We are taking a lesson from the Japanese, who are consummate gift givers, to provide you with a venue to pick up something for friends or a memento of the weekend for yourselves. We, of course, still have Taiko drumming, always a favorite, which as Shumei practices it, is a spiritual discipline in itself. Check your pamphlet schedule to see the rest of today’s activities. But briefly, you will be free until 2 o’clock right after we adjourn from here to purchase a bite of lunch if you like at the food service building and browse the Shumei garden and vendor tents. Activities will resume both here and in the food service building at 2 o’clock. At 5:30, if you would like to attend Evening Sampai in the sanctuary, you should start moving up the hill and be seated by 5:40. Bring your program with you for the chants that will be recited. And by the way, bring your program back if you’re coming tomorrow as only a limited number have been printed. Following Sampai there will be singing and a candlelight ceremony for world peace right back here in the amphitheater for about a half hour. The Sunday schedule is the same as in past years: at 10:30, the anniversary sampai and keynote speech by Ms. Hiroko Koyama, world president of Shumei; at 12 noon a free, organic and natural agriculture luncheon; and at 2:30 a special presentation by Chin Chin Gutierrez, award winning environmental activist and actress from the Philippines. I have seen a performance by Chin Chin in Japan and I assure you that you’re in for a moving experience. Now, before I hand the microphone to Alan Imai, Sensai here at Shumei International Institute, I want to introduce you to SII’s governing mission. And that is: “Inspired by the philosophy of Mokichi Okada, Shumei International Institute helps people of the world realize that they are world citizens able to act for the common good.”
The founder’s belief, that all nations are of one family, is what pulled me the strongest into being a Friend of Shumei. It is Shumei’s belief that once people of the planet can look beyond the differences of ethnicity, customs, religions, skin color, facial features, politics and such, they will see much more significant characteristics that we have in common. Things like the universal sense of right and wrong, survival, justice, humor, breathable air and potable water to list a very few. Ultimately we’re all in this life together on this orb of water and rock, we call Earth, hurtling through space. To what end we can only conjecture. So why not do it in peace. By helping each other. With an acceptance of each other as being of one family, world peace, cannot help but come. Mokichi Okada called it heaven on earth. Keeping the concept in mind on a daily basis, that you are a citizen of the world, your perspective broadens. Whatever you call it, world peace or heaven on earth, as captain kirk of the Starship Enterprise says, make it so. Finally, briefly, I just can’t help but mention a particular tragedy that’s going on right now. As you can’t help but know, a hole was poked into this planet on the sea floor, something went wrong, failsafe systems failed, a lethal black stream spewed and continues to spew like from a planet-size, aorta-shot elephant. And the first life forms to suffer are members of what our indigenous peoples might call the ocean nation. In this nation large populations of everything from microscopic organisms to whales will suffer and die and are doing so as we sit here now. Reports say sea turtles, such gentle, innocuous creatures, a favorite of mine, have already washed up on beaches. Dead. Members of the seashore nations (if you will), plant, animal, and the human animal will suffer, if not already, then soon and for a long, long time. Why? I’ve been listening to the news, listening to the companies involved blaming each other. Shortly thereafter the American government seemed to admit to some responsibility for lax regulation. I asked myself, does the buck stop there? And then I realized a horrible fact—that, no—I am responsible. Obliviously responsible. I was born into a period in Earth’s history, long enough after airplanes and automobiles were invented that such transportation was taken for granted. What powered them wasn’t much thought about until looming scarcity shot prices up. I still pull up to the pump and put the fuel nozzle into the throat of my gas tank and think very little about it. I must and will start thinking! – because of the sea turtle and all of his oceanic neighbors. We’ve all heard the words, “unintended consequences” and “weapons of mass destruction.” This is unintended mass destruction. Now, I don’t know how much oil deposits have to do with the balance of nature when they are left alone. To my knowledge they seem to be neither helping nor hurting anything right where they are. The only problem is when we start messing with them. And we’ve created a civilization in which, now, we have to mess with them. We are dependent. No one would be here in this amphitheater right now if it weren’t for airplane and automobile fuel. What this tragedy, and writing this small speech, have driven home to me is that all those innocent sea creatures are not only part of our family of life, but we need them to survive. And we need for them to survive so that ¬we can survive. Island nations in particular, like Japan and the Philippines, would be hard pressed to survive without an abundance of sea creatures. We need them. They don’t need us. At lease they didn’t until we so globally impacted their habitat. Now they indeed need us to stop messing with them in mindless ways¬ – for their own sake and for ours. This, of course, applies to all wildlife, not just wild sea life. So I’m thinking that we might want to create a mission statement for the world that includes all life, not just people. Mokichi Okada, known in Shumei as Meishusama, said everything we need to know we can learn from nature. Well, a teaching moment is at hand. Thanks.
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Shumei
International Institute |
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